We aim to make our website accessible and easy to use and we have taken great care to ensure the high quality of our site, including compliance with appropriate Internet standards and guidelines. By taking such care we can provide the widest support possible for modern browsers, and a number of accessibility related technologies, thus making your visit pleasant and trouble-free, displaying the information as it was intended. This page provides technical and support information about our website.
Standards and Guidelines Compliance
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Browser compatability
This site is best view at 1024x768 or above (1280x1024 is ideal). Our web site has been extensively tested with the following browser/platform combinations (in alphabetical order):
- Camino 1 (Mac)
- Epiphany 2 (Linux)
- Galeon 2 (Linux)
- Google Chrome 1 (Win)
- Konqueror 4 (Linux)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 6 (Win)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7 (Win)
- Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 8 (Win)
- Mozilla Firefox 2 (Win/Linux)
- Mozilla Firefox 3 (Win/Linux)
- Mozilla Firefox 3.5 (Win/Linux)
- Opera 9 (Win/Linux)
- Safari 3 (Win/Mac)
- Safari 4 (Win/Mac)
- Sea Monkey 1 (Win/Linux)
We recommend Mozilla Firefox.
Known browser issues
Whilst we have taken every care to try to eliminate all inconsistencies amongst browsers, some browser features do not function as expected. These browser specific issues have no work-around, and as a result you may observe their effects - although in most cases these are merely superficial.
- Internet Explorer 7
This browser appears to ‘hang’ (stop responding) during uploads. It is in fact still sending data, and will return to normal once the upload completes.
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7
Text that appears at the foot of a list may appear indented initially, then moves to it's correct alignment when hovered over using the mouse. This is a well known bug within Internet Explorer itself which has never been fixed.
- Internet Explorer 6
Background colour from division elements will ‘bleed’ across the page at certail page widths, this may occur on the forms on this site. This is a well known bug within Internet Explorer itself and appears to be fixed in IE7.
Left margin text indent may change slightly at random positions (varies according to screen size) even though underlying code is the same. A very minor bug which seems to be IE6 specific.
Forms or tables appear below the navigation bar on short pages when the display area is less than approx 680 pixels wide, (depends on screen size). The background colour of the affected element may also spread across the left hand side of the page. This is due to the way IE displays elements that are larger than the window width. Normally IE displays this under the navigation even though this still requires a scroll bar, (Mozilla based browsers simply introduce a scroll bar, and thus display the page correctly). This issue appears to be fixed in IE7
- Internet Explorer < 6
Versions of Internet Explorer earlier than version 6 are now obsolete and NOT supported by this site (and are no longer supported by Microsoft themselves).
- Safari 2 browser on Windows
There is a known bug in early Windows versions of Safari that prevents javascript print functions. As a work-around it is possible to print manually (file menu -> print). This is fixed in later versions of Safari and can be resolved by upgrading your browser.
- Konqueror 3
Absolutely positioned element may be positioned relative to the page, not the parent when the page is refreshed. This affects a small number of buttons on the online registration and update forms and is a bug in the Konqueror web-browser. This is fixed in Konqueror 4.1.4.
- Konqueror 3.1.4
List items with a no-repeat background image, (such as on our questions pages), will repeat the image. This is a bug in Konqueror that has been fixed in Konqueror 3.4.2.
- Firefox 2
Text in popup windows may not wrap as expected if the status bar width is wider than window. All popup windows on this site are resizable to ensure that all content can be read.
Printed forms may break irregularly across pages due to poor support for CSS page-break properties.
- Mozilla based browsers
Space intermittently appears between menu elements at different zoom levels. This was raised as a bug with Mozilla - #248802, and closed and fixed in Firefox v1.5(b1) and Mozilla 1.7.8.
- Netscape Communicator
This is an obsolete browser that does not support modern standards and NOT supported by this site. We recommend that you upgrade your browser.
Common issues
- The form buttons fail to operate
The buttons on our forms rely on JavaScript. If no action is performed when the buttons are pressed, you may need to enable JavaScript in your web browser, and then restart the browser.
- Links that say they will open in a new window do not
This again is typically a JavaScript issue.
For other issues, please use the request form to contact our Software Engineering department.
